PAUL KRUGMAN
It really is amazing to watch this chaotic horror show play
out at the highest levels of a great nation’s government. But I guess this is
what you have to expect when you hand over the reins of power to a con man,
whose whole career has been based on convincing naïve marks that he’s a
brilliant deal maker, but turns out to have no idea how to actually govern.
Oh, wait — did you think I was talking about Donald Trump?
I’m talking about Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, an obvious phony who
nonetheless convinced the rubes — that is, much
of the news media and the political establishment — that he was a
brilliant fiscal expert. What we’re witnessing now is the end of the charade,
the political equivalent of what happened when graduates of Trump
University tried to get some value in return for their money.
On Thursday, House Republicans unveiled a tax “reform” bill
with the same good order and careful deliberation with which they unveiled
their various attempts to repeal Obamacare. That is, after having had years to
prepare, the G.O.P. waited until the last minute to throw something together,
without any hearings or serious analysis.
Budget wonks are frantically going through the legislative
language, trying to figure out what it means and what it would do — but they
can take some comfort in the fact that the bill’s authors are almost equally in
the dark. .
O.K., some things are clear: The bill would give huge tax
breaks to corporations and the wealthy, especially wealthy heirs, while opening
vast new opportunities for tax avoidance. You won’t go far wrong if you think
of the big tax cuts in the law as having been custom designed to benefit the Trump
family.
But these big tax cuts would blow a multitrillion-dollar
hole in the budget, so Republicans have been scrambling to find “pay-fors” that
limit the addition to the deficit. What they came up with was a hodgepodge of
stuff: ending deductions for some state and local taxes, limiting deductions
for mortgage interest, phasing out child tax credits, and so on.
Since the point of these measures is to offset tax cuts for
the rich, they will, more or less by definition, end up raising
taxes on large numbers of middle-class families.
Will this bill pass the House? Unclear: Some important
interest groups, like homebuilders and
the small-business
lobby, have already declared opposition. In any case, it almost surely
can’t become law in anything like its current form: A tax bill can’t pass the
Senate with less than 60 votes if it raises the long-term budget deficit, which
this bill surely does. In fact, this bill might not even get a simple Senate
majority.
So right now tax cuts are looking like health care redux:
With many years to prepare, Republicans turn out to be completely unready for
prime time. But how did they get to this point?
The answer is that this week’s debacle was predictable from
the moment, more than seven years ago, that Ryan began establishing himself as
a media darling by publishing impressive-looking blueprints for fiscal reform
with titles like “Roadmap for America’s Future.”
Like the bill just released, all these blueprints included
huge tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy; but Ryan insisted that any
revenue losses would be made up for by ending unjustified tax breaks. Which tax
breaks would he eliminate? He refused to say.
These evasions worked brilliantly as a public relations
strategy. Those who warned about
his plans’ phoniness were ignored. Ryan even received awards
for fiscal responsibility.
But actual legislation can’t close huge fiscal gaps with
vague promises. To hand out those big tax cuts while raising the deficit by
“only” $1.5 trillion, Republicans needed to find real money somewhere, and that
turns out to be really hard.
The big question should be, why do any of this? Ryan used to
claim that his plans were about reducing the budget deficit, but he has now
given up that pretense.
And why should tax cuts even be on the table? We have budget
deficits, not surpluses, and lots of unmet needs for future spending. U.S.
taxes are low, not high, compared with other wealthy countries. Predictions
that tax cuts will lead to rapid economic growth have been wrong time and
again. And by large margins, voters want
taxes on corporations and the wealthy to go up, not down.
The ruling theory among Republicans seems to be that going
into the midterm elections they need a “win” to offset their failure to repeal
Obamacare. I guess this might be right, although it’s a theory that reveals
extraordinary contempt for voters, who are supposed to be impressed by the
G.O.P.’s ability to ram through policies that only benefit a tiny elite.
How ever the politics turn out, this is remarkably terrible
policy, devised via a remarkably terrible process. Most Americans realize that
Donald Trump is a very bad president; they need to realize that his party’s
congressional leadership is pretty awful, too.
_____
De THE NEW YORK TIMES, 03/11/2017
No comments:
Post a Comment